OneMind

A Congress too weak and frightened of appearing vindictive and too beholden to the same special interests that keep the GOP in power now wants to impeach Attorney General Alberto “Fredo” Gonzalez. They remind me of the 120-pound weaklings who stand behind cardboard cutouts of muscular men and have their pictures taken: they want to appear tough, they just don’t want to do the hard work it takes to get that way.

Impeaching Gonzalez is a silly, empty gesture. It’s all but certain he’d resign before impeachment came to trial. Given the fact that last weekend, not even Fox Opinion Media (improperly known in some circles as Fox News) was able to get a single member of the White House staff or the GOP side of either the Senate or House Judiciary Committee to stand up for him, the guy’s dead meat. Gonzo is Gonezo.

In the context of corruption, lies, unconstitutional behavior, domestic spying, and other associated muck which coats the White House co-presidents Bush and Cheney, impeaching an underling is both futile and weak. There’s no way an impeachment of either of the top guns will stand given the GOP’s remaining strength and its complete unwillingness to see how much worse this bozo is than Clinton ever could have been. All we can do now is tough out the next 540 days, hope to keep the current regime from doing too much more damage, and then bring in a huge broom and lots of disinfectant when the Dems take control of the levers of power in January 2009.

Oh, yeah, and begin working now on a Constitutional convention. The Democrats may be somewhat better but they’ve proven their own cowardice and corruption as well. Time for a citizen-led house-cleaning. Hopefully without violence.

I’ve discovered that searching for YouTube videos in the iPhone application provided for viewing them doesn’t work worth a plugged nickel.

A colleague did a video about the Baha’i faith. I wanted to see how it looked on my iPhone. So I popped up the YouTube app, tapped on search and entered “Baha’i”. Quick response: no videos. I thought perhaps he hadn’t keyworded it right so I went to my laptop and searched for it by the same term. It found about 1,260 videos, many of which had the word “Baha’i” in their titles.

I noticed that the YouTube search engine asked me if I really intended to search for “Bahai” without the apostrophe. I did that; 2,260 on my laptop, still zero on my iPhone. WTF?

I searched for Chess. iPhone shows six results of the 12,600 found on my laptop. I can’t discern yet what order the ones that are on my iPhone show up in or what criteria are used to select the six that show up. I also can’t figure out how to find more Chess videos. Resubmitting the search results in no changes to the results screen.

Lame.

Well, I’ve used my iPhone now for three days or so and more today than on the other days combined. I’m starting to feel more at home with the keyboard. I’ve found that if I use the edge of the tip of my finger and remember to touch just to the left of where the letter is on the keyboard, I get a significant increase in accuracy (though it’s still far short of what I’ll consider usable).

When I first saw the Contacts main screen, I thought, “What in the world are those little tiny letters down the right side of the screen going to do for me?” The alphabet appears top to bottom. I tried tapping on one of the letters and it brought me quickly to that part of the listing starting with that letter. Those letters are so tiny that I’m often off by a letter or two, but it’s pretty quick to get to where I want. This obviated one concern I had: how was I going to search for folks when I wanted to make a phone call? I get it now. That and the use of bold on last names (your option, could be first names as I recall) makes scanning through my virtual Rolodex at least as fast as typing a search term and safer when on the move.

Google gets kudos for having a suite of apps tuned specifically to the iPhone. Very nice. But there are some issues I’ve already discovered. For one thing, there’s no way to report an email as spam in gMail from the iPhone; the link simply isn’t provided. I can’t imagine why. That’s just one aspect of the mail UI that bugs me; another is that there are no checkboxes. To delete an email, you must actually open it. Dumb. I’ve also noticed that in Google Reader (which admittedly is still in the Labs) there are often display problems when I shift the orientation from vertical to horizontal and vice versa. I get a hybrid screen. Tipping it back and forth seems to solve the problem and perhaps it’s somehow bandwidth-related.

While it certainly won’t replace my PowerBook G4 (that’s right; no MacBook Pro yet) as my primary traveling system, I may yet be able to make sufficiently effective use of my iPhone to justify keeping it.

One other thing: Cingular/AT&T coverage is so far vastly superior to the Verizon coverage I’ve come to know and hate. This puppy works very well at my desk, getting full bars where my Verizon phone chokes about 1/3 of the time and never has more than 2 bars.

Dogs are more important than Asian factory workers.

That, at least, is one viable conclusion one can reach in light of the news that Nike and Rebok are altering deals with Atlanta Falcons’ QB Mike Vick in the wake of his arraignment on charges of being involved in a massive dog-fighting ring. He pleaded not guilty to the charges today.

Nike is widely known to use Asian sweatshop labor in manufacturing its products. At one point, Rebok had its name on several factories in Asia that employed sweatshop tactics, though there are some who suggest now that Rebok is in the process of reform leadership.

For many years, human rights advocates have been battling to get American multinationals to take a stand against such horrendous labor practices as those engaged in by Asian nations in particular. They have succeeded, e.g., in getting Gap to take a strong position with a clear set of rules that make it a high risk for a vendor to engage in any activity that leads to sweatshop labor being applied to its products.

Why People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is more successful in this fight than others appear to be, I can’t say. And I don’t begrudge them their success here even though I think the group sometimes strays way over the line of reasonableness in pursuing its agenda. But for Nike and Rebok to consider major changes to deals with Vick over an unproven allegation to which he has plead not guilty and simultaneously ignore clearly documented and irrefutable proof of sweatshop involvement is beyond me. Or it would be if I didn’t understand the first rule of journalism: follow the money.

While I’m at it….

As far as I can tell, every application I use on OSX remembers the folder from which I open a document and when I do a “Save As…” defaults to that folder for the location of the file version I’m now creating.

But not MS Office. It defaults to the last folder in which I saved any document, regardless of where the current document was stored when I opened it. That is almost never what I want. So why does Microsoft do this?

I have lots of reasons for preferring OpenOffice (or its OS X port/equivalent, NeoOffice) to MS Office. This and the immediate previous post described just two of the dozens of annoyances MS builds into its products for no apparently good reason.

I get so tired of Microsoft playing by different rules from everyone else, don’t you?

Today, for the umpteenth time, I tried to save a document in MS Word on my OS X system. I provided a document title that is meaningful to me so I can find the document later. I hit “Save”. The file dialog goes away and you think your document is about to be saved.

But, no. Instead, you see a small dialog that informs you that your document title is too long. This on an OS that, like virtually every modern OS, 255-character names. Win XP supports 255-character names.

So why does Microsoft continue to limit file names to 31 characters (and where did that stupid limit come from anyway?) on OS X documents? Their WinXP version doesn’t suffer from this limitation.

It’s just annoying. I’m sure it’s not as obstinate and deliberate as it seems but I keep remembering this is a company that decided in its first OSes tha nobody needed more than 64K of RAM.

After deciding a few weeks ago during iPhonePhrenzy that I would not buy one of the nifty little gadgets, I came up with a need today that seemed like the iPhone might well help with. I’m in the midst of a significant Web site revision and redeployment for my primary client. One of the teams I work with is in New York. It would clearly be necessary for me to be better able to interact with the team both in terms of reviewing Web pages and in terms of exchanging emails to keep the project from getting bogged down.

I spent about two hours trying to get my Palm Treo 600 to do these tasks and got very frustrated. So I broke down and went and bought an iPhone.

The good news is that this is one slick user experience. I’ve never used an iPod so I was ga-ga over features most of the early adopters of the iPhone probably glossed over. The graphical quality of the screen is amazing. Web pages show up brilliantly and it didn’t take me long to figure out navigation, searching, and other such tasks via Safari on the iPhone. And a lot of the coolness factor is indeed extremely cool.

That said, it seems to me after a few hours with this beautiful and tantalizing beast that it may in fact not do what I need to do. And that, in turn, may indicate that what I want just can’t be done with any hand-held devices yet.

I use Google’s gMail for my mail. I love the program. I love its spam filtering. I love its labels which make categorization so easy. I love the Web 2.0-style UI. I have all of my POP email accounts forwarding to it and I do all my email with it.

But it appears unworkable with the iPhone. Even though Google has a set of services tailored to the iPhone, including gMail, the virtual keyboard is the second most painful thing on which I’ve ever tried to type. It took me 10 minutes tonight to compose a two-sentence reply to a colleague’s email. The problems I ran into:

• My long, fat fingers are clearly far too big for the keyboard. Hitting the right key is almost an evil video game.
• The type-ahead does not work at all as far as I can tell. I type “tom” hoping for a completion option of “tomorrow” and I get “toj” even though I’ve clearly typed “tom.” Not once did the type-ahead help provide any useful assistance.
• Randomly, I found that pressing on the backspace key ONCE would result in the backspace key being entered so many times that the entire message is erased. This happened to me twice, including once when I was two characters from being done with the message.

Maybe I just need to spend more time practicing with it. I don’t know. I have 14 days to return the phone and if this were Day 14, it’d be gone.

But I’d miss it.

The dust-up between the Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton camps over when to talk with other countries about Iraq has created a bit of a tempest in a teapot. Clinton’s team is trying to make Obama sound hopelessly naive on foreign policy while Obama’s group tries to position Clinton’s indication she would not talk with other Middle Eastern countries about Iraq as essentially a continuation of the Bush Regime’s policy.

The question seems to come down to one of timing. Obama said he’d meet — without precondition — in the first year of his presidency with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Clinton vowed not to because, she said, some diplomatic spadework was needed in advance of such talks. Clearly Obama didn’t say there shouldn’t be homework in advance of the meetings, so on some level at least this is a distinction without a difference.

But I see this as telling.

Obama is bold, ready and willing to move into even untested territory to differentiate himself from the current GOP regime in Washington. Clinton wants to play it cautious, close to the vest, and predictably conditionally. Clinton wants to attack her Democratic party opponents; Obama wants to blaze new territory and focus on Bush and the archaic GOOP.

That’s an easy choice for me. Clinton moved down another notch and Obama moved up. Now it’s:

• Kucinich
• Obama (tie)
• Edwards (tie)

It’s only fitting. Barry Bonds sat out the final game in the Milwaukee three-game series which means he needs to hit two homers to tie Hank Aaron and one more to become the all-time home run king and that he’s likely to do it on the Giants’ upcoming seven-game home stand.

Pretty considerate of the Giants and Bonds to give him a shot at doing it in front of a home crowd. It’s the only stadium in baseball where the feat won’t be demeaned by judgmental fans who’ve condemned Bonds for using steroids without any court or other judicial body finding him guilty.

My wife and I went to see Michael Moore’s “Sicko” this afternoon and while I must say I was impressed with the quality of the film and the veracity of its core message, I took away two lessons that were for me profound in their impact on my view of modern American society.

Overshadowing, for me, the message that the American health care system is broken (duh) were two other messages that Moore made quite clearly in an offbeat documentary.

First, the notion that if the “have nots” in this country really decided to take the power they have and vote, then this country could once again hope to achieve the greatness it has forfeited in the past 50 years of what can only be described as a peculiarly American form of fascism.
The government and Corporate America have conspired, perhaps not even consciously, over the past 30-40 years, to keep the lower end of the economic spectrum in this country feeling hopeless, uninformed and buried in debt because such people are wonderful employees of corporate machines. As one Frenchman Moore interviewed pointed out, if those Americans were suddenly to realize how much power they have and exercised it at the polls, a true revolution would take place.

Second, Moore draws a clear distinction between modern American society and the societies of other countries whose peoples’ quality of life, by almost any measure, are superior to ours. And the distinction he sees — with crystal clear and correct vision — is that those societies focus on “we” and ours focuses on “me”.

Read more for the rest of this perspective.

In those societies, there is a clearly understood notion that we take care of each other, that we have an obligation to be our brothers’ keeper. Any attempt to re-introduce that idea into America — where it held firm sway until the 1950′s when the rise of the military-industrial complex began — is met with cries about how much taxation that would mean for each of us as individuals. The broader question of how much benefit might inure to the citizens of our country least able to take care of themselves never even gets raised because the Powers That Be simply change the subject by using meme labels.

Social change, then, must come from the grass roots. We must organize those who are at and below the middle of our culture in terms of access to power, education and the perks of being a citizen, and mobilize into effective political action. If we don’t, we are doomed to failure as a society. The rise of Europe on our Eastern flank and China on our Western front are signals that the world at large prefers “we” to “me”. That is the great change we must begin and reflect upon if we are to save our nation for future generations.